Physicists Have Mixed Matter and Light at Room Temperature for the First Time

6/15/2016

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Light and matter are not just only separate but they
have completely distinct properties, but now physicists have confined a
particle of light - called a photon - with a molecule in a small, golden enclosure
of mirrors. This quite a big deal, because it shows a completely new technique
to manipulate the physical and chemical properties of matter, and possibly will
change the way we process quantum information.

This has been achieved before but those experiments
were carried out at very low temperatures. Bow that physicists have achieved
this at room temperature, the process is "chemically easily to
access", which means researcher can now do cool stuff with it. One of the
researchers, Ortwin Hess, said:

“We can now do a whole range of experiments on matter
and light that would have been costly and difficult before. We could use light
to change chemical structures, molecule by molecule. It could also be useful in
quantum technologies. Light carries quantum information, and we could use this
strong coupling to copy the information over to matter and back”

This not only has pretty impressive applications but it
is so much incredible that it’s a pretty perfect demonstration of light's
quantum effects.

Now, molecules are capable of discharging photons - little
blinks of light - when they change their energy states. But typically once
these photons are released, they never come back, and the two never ever mix
again.

In order to achieve this a team of researcher from the
University of Cambridge, created a tiny trap, so tiny that when a molecule releases
a photon, the photon can't escape from it.

This effects the energy to fluctuate back and forth among
the molecule and the photon over and over again, generating a mixed state
that's part matter, part light.

This trap is sort of golden hall of mirrors. Known as a
'nanopore', it's a void just a billionth of a metre (or 1 nanometre) wide,
which was made between a little sphere of gold and a gold film.

Now that researchers been able to attain this procedure
at room temperature, it opens up a complete new way of discovering the
structure of matter and procedures like photosynthesis, where plants are able
to harness the energy of light to generate energy. I’am honestly eager to see
what happens next.